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The IRS and the New Crony Socialism

RUSH: This is Ken in Bridgeport, West Virginia. I'm glad you waited. Great to have you on the program. Hi.

CALLER: It's great to be on your program, sir.

RUSH: Thank you.

CALLER: I'm just calling about Lois Lerner. They said they can't come up with these e-mails. I've worked for the government on DOJ. I wasn't Treasury, but my computer system is inconsequential. It goes to a server. Meaning if I'm here in West Virginia and I had to travel to, say, to California, I can get on a computer in the DOJ office in California and get my profile and all my reports are on there, e-mails, and I keep on working, so --

RUSH: Right. It's on the server. It's in the cloud.

CALLER: Right. So when they said they can't come up with it, you know, actually her computer desk, that tower is meaningless. It's the server. So, I mean, how is the server scrubbed?

RUSH: Not only that, I mean, you may not have heard, but they've announced today that six more people involved in this, their e-mails are gone, too. Six more people's e-mails have just -- they don't know what happened. They're just gone. It's a terrible thing.

CALLER: Something's not right with that.

RUSH: Of course it's not, because everything's backed up.

CALLER: Correct.

RUSH: There's a federal requirement since Eisenhower that there have to be contingent -- this can't happen.

CALLER: No.

RUSH: There's more than one backup. There's redundancy all over the place.

CALLER: Well, it has to be 'cause if you have a FOIA request, it doesn't go to the specific office here. It goes to your headquarters, legal division goes in there and pulls the information to be sent to the other attorney.

RUSH: Right.

CALLER: So that's why, when I'm hearing all this on TV, why aren't other questions being asked about the server system at IRS and how it operates?

RUSH: Well, who would ask 'em? See, this is like Snerdley came in to me today and said, "When are they gonna appoint a special prosecutor?" I said, "Who's gonna demand one?" That's the answer to your question, well, who's gonna ask where they are? We got three people that will: Darrell Issa, Jeff Sessions, and Trey Gowdy, maybe Ted Cruz. We got four people who would ask about this and demand a special prosecutor, and then it would have to be the Department of Justice that would actually appoint one which would be Holder, which, I'm sorry, it's not gonna happen. I don't care what, that isn't gonna happen.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I want to review something here in a little more detail that I mentioned in the opening hour of the program today. Snerdley came in and asked about the special prosecutor, why isn't there one over the IRS e-mails.

Well, I laughed. And I very tastefully, gently told him my opinion on this. We don't live in the same political atmosphere that we did even as recently as the late nineties with Clinton. I said, "There's not gonna be a special prosecutor in the IRS e-mails." I mean, there might be, but it's really, really doubtful, and if there is, it's gonna be after a lot of anguish and after a lot of fixes are already in. And I said the reason why is that the conflict today is not between Republicans and Democrats in Washington like we grew up thinking it was. The opposing forces in this country are not Republicans and Democrats in Washington.

Now, they are during elections because obviously they're vying for power and who's gonna run the town. But after the election they join up, because what's changed here is the nature of the conflict. The conflict now is all of Washington versus people like you and me who do not want an ever-expanding, increasingly powerful, and in-control-of-everything government. But they do. And I told him, I read a really good piece at RedState.com today explaining this by defining the new crony capitalism or crony socialism and how it works. And it's just a microcosm of how a lot of things in Washington are working.

In the old days company A in the same business as company B and therefore competing with company B would try to beat company B with a better product and better customer service, lower prices, better retail op, whatever. The competition took place in the market between company A and company B. With the advent of Barack Obama, somebody willing to co-opt the private sector and use it and therefore control it, the seductive nature of that appealed to quite a few CEOs. And so now company A does not compete with company B directly. Company A competes with company B by aligning with government, rendering company B helpless.

For example, let's use, as the Red State piece does, Walmart. In the old days, if a Democrat liberal comes along and wants socialized medicine, national health care, the assumption would be that there isn't a company in the world that will want to go along with this, because the people that run companies are interested in free markets and freedom and liberty, and open competition and so forth. It might appear attractive to them in the sense that maybe they'd like to get rid of the health care expense. But what's changed is that Walmart is happy to support Obama and Obamacare as a means of competing with company B and company C, because they are so is big, they can afford whatever new costs that Obamacare presents them.

As they support Obama, they're in good stead with Obama, and Obama treats them well and maybe gives them some breaks and some waivers or what have you, that company B doesn't get. Company B can't afford Obamacare, and so company A wins without having to be any better. It's just their alliance with government that overpowers company B. Another example from the story, Costco. You would think that no legitimate private sector business would ever be in favor of raising the minimum wage. Costco is. Why? They can afford it, and they know that their competitors can't.

So they associate with the government, the government becomes their best buddy, again granting them waivers on Obamacare or other things that come down the pike, all for supporting Obama's ideological desire of raising the minimum wage, and whatever happens to the market is of no consequence. All that matters is that company A, in this circumstance, is winning by virtue of its alliance with government.

Financial services companies, same thing. They are protected if they support Obama. What do they do? Well, look, the stock market is going through the roof while the economy's contracting. How's that happen? One of the ways it happens is the Federal Reserve is printing money and giving it to the stock market and people that invest in the stock market.

So people who are moving and buying and selling and making deals with money are making more money, but there isn't a better product for consumers, there's not additional customer service, and yet these companies are becoming more and more profitable, all the while Obama runs 'em to shreds. But that's just for show. American business, at least as represented by the Chamber of Commerce and K Street, is deeply and profoundly opposed to the idea of the Tea Party and free markets. "American business has entered a twilight where government coercion is used to put competitors out of business and to prevent new entrants to business." He cites the Walmart example.

"Walmart’s support of Obamacare is obviously predicated on the fact that Walmart can absorb the increased labor costs more readily than their competitors, likewise Costco’s enthusiasm for a higher minimum wage is inspired by the knowledge that this will hurt competitors. The fierce resistance of taxi companies to companies like Uber have nothing to do with safety or customer service but rather a determination to maintain their comfortable monopoly. The Chamber of Commerce is pushing 'comprehensive immigration reform' in order to provide its member companies with sources of cheap labor both in the high tech industry as well as in agricultural and unskilled service jobs."

"We are hardly a generation away from a government-crony capitalist oligopoly such as exists in Russia. American business, as personified by the Chamber of Commerce, Wall Street, and K Street are right to fear conservatism. And the sooner that we conservatives come to the conclusion that our interests ... are not the same as the Chamber of Commerce the sooner we can get about our business."

His point here is that we -- the Tea Party, the Republican base, conservatism -- is the real enemy of all of this crony capitalism, while those of us who make up the base may not know it. We think that our friends are like us and think the Democrats are the enemy. But our guys don't think the Democrats are. They think we're the enemy!

Have you not found that to be the case? Conservatives are thought to be the nutcases, the wackos. Why? Free markets, individual responsibility, all of these things that built the country? No, no, no! That would end the crony capitalism. That would mean these people competing on their own. They don't want to do that.

It's seductive to be close to power, particularly if you have a president whose totally willing to take over as much of the private sector as possible. If that gets your stock price up and keeps you profitable while the economy's in the tank for sure everybody else, so what? All the while people are thinking that Big Business is Republican, and it isn't. It's Washington! This is why they hate the Tea Party.

This is why Washington -- every political consultant, every Democrat, every Republican -- rips the Tea Party. It is why they do it. There's a lot of money being made by this crony socialism or capitalism going on, and the money is being made by not having to compete, not having to be better than your competitor. The simple association with government wipes out your competition, 'cause they don't have it and can't compete when you do.